After a half-hour on the phone with a tech rep from Dell I learn that Dell builds some portables (including some Latitude models) so that the BIOS can be upgrade with linux (i.e., they provide the firmare as .hdr files), and others can _only_ be upgraded via Windows or DOS. My E5410 (and its replacement, the E5420) will run linux perfectly but the BIOSes cannot be upgraded with this OS.
If someone has a FreeDOS bootable USB stick on which I can copy the two .exe files (because the BIOS version needs to be upgraded first to A10, then A11) I would like to borrow it. Alternatively, if someone can teach me how to make a bootable FreeDOS USB drive with a vfat file system rather than an iso9660 file system (read-only) from fd11src.iso, that would work, too. I'm quite upset that Dell would support linux on only some models and not others. But, since I've a lot of money invested in this laptop I want to upgrade the BIOS so it will use all 8G of RAM and fix a few other glitches. Rich _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
